My father passed away due to lung cancer on Feb 1 2003, at Fr Mullers Hospital, Mangalore. It was my promise to him that I would help cancer patients at their terminal stages. This promise was realized in 2007 when we setup Ave Maria Palliative care under the CDSE organization. I am grateful to Professor Clement Dsouza(late) who was instrumental in bringing together Dr Lavina Noronha, Dr Rita Noronha and myself and getting this facility off the ground which has helped thousands of terminally ill patients as well as relieved the family members from stress and pain.

My daughter Neola was born in 2005 in the US as a 24-week premature baby weighing just 643 grams and was miraculously saved as a normal baby. The Lord was merciful enough on us to have Neola without any long term ailment, thanks to the skill and passion of medical professionals of NICU at Inova Fairfax hospital in Virginia. If that was not the case, my wife Nancy and I would have had to spend our entire lifetime caring for our child. How would we pay back to the Lord? We were looking for a cause that could have a profound impact on small children who are suffering due to variety of reasons in impoverished sections of the society.

We chose the cause of childhood cancer given the fact that many children are impacted by the disease in their early childhood and also they have a chance of full recovery if provided with right treatment on time. I had no expertise in this field, which required identifying the right patient population and managing the treatment cycles. I visited the childhood cancer center at Kidwai Memorial Hospital in Bangalore to learn about how they were managing such programs at a massive scale. Dr. Appaji, Oncologist at Kidwai provided the right guidance to setup such a facility in Mangalore. So, in 2012, with the help of Dr. Rita Noronha and CEDSE we established a framework to support the children at Wenlock Government Hospital in Mangalore. Dr. ShantaramBaliga, who was leading the KMC unit of Oncology at Wenlock, fully supported us in building the program. This had an immense impact on the lives of pediatric cancer patients (mainly Leukemia) not only from the suburbs of Mangalore but also patients coming to Mangalore from remote villages of northern Karnataka –such as Hassan, Bidar, Chikmagaluru and Gulbarga. We realized that the families of children with cancer would travel any distance using all resource they had to get the treatment. These are the families living on daily wages, who had no money even to travel to Mangalore for care, leave alone the cost of boarding and lodging. They were to lose their income as well as had no way to support other siblings of the child patient. We tried to help these causes in addition to supporting the treatment of the patient. Government schemes also were of great help for the treatment of actual disease but it did not cover diagnosis and other required tests to determine the actual type of cancer.

All of these efforts needed the help from generous donors from India and around the globe whom we are very grateful to. This also needed dedicated personnel like social workers with experience in social medicine and skills in connecting with people for constant follow-ups and counseling. With this initiative, many children have recovered and have gone back to school and to their normal life. More research is needed to identify the root cause of how cancer starts in human body, how it can be prevented and eventually cured. Until then, programs like ours will support patients and alleviate their burden to some extent.